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Although this post is almost a full week late; it's time to announce the arrival of our new shed. Sorry that it's so overdue, but I've been building some things in the meantime.

Last Saturday it arrived. Actually, it was a pretty interesting thing to watch. The fellow who owns Sheds Unlimited arrived just as planned, right at 7 AM. However, he brought a crew that I didn't expect at all. His entire team was Amish.

I've got nothing against the Amish, in fact, I respect them quite a bit. However, these guys weren't regular Amish... They were Super-Amish. They had all the regular Amish goodness, but they wielded power tools. If you think a regular Amish carpenter is good, you'd be amazed at the power of an Amish with an air-nailer.

They were finished by 9 AM. Complete. The photo above was taken just before they departed. It's really well made, and I'm quite happy with the results.

I've started getting the workshop set up. I've picked up several of the large tools from my parents' home in North Coventry; and I'm putting it all together. Soon I'll be able to start work on even more outrageous halloween projects.

That reminds me... I've never posted the pictures of my new pneumatic monster... I really should do that.

I realize that the site has been quiet for a while. I have been quite busy with numerous projects, including the...

The Bamboo Flooring Project

For Jessawick's birthday, we decided to lay a new floor in the office. It had the same carpet since we bought the house, and it was getting a bit worn. And by worn, I mean foul.

We both love bamboo, so that's the way we went. We found a beautiful natural bamboo flooring at the local flooring place.

Demolition was the first (and worst) part of the job. Jessawick ripped up a lot of the carpet during the day while I was at work. After the carpet (and pad) were removed, we needed to remove all the tack strips and staples from the floor below.

As you can see, the carpet was placed over the existing hardwood floor. The hardwood itself was in pretty bad shape. We had to pull lots of staples out and clean it up before we could start laying the new flooring.

On a side note: Dyson vacuums are amazing. We have the "yellow" model. I think it's exceptional. It pulls stuff out of a rug that will terrify you. Much more effective than anything else we've owned. We used it extensively in cleaning up the floor.

I decided it was in our best interest to rent a pneumatic nailer for the job. I had never run a flooring nailer before, so it was a new experience. For those of you that have never had the pleasure, a flooring nailer is a special air-powered nail "shooter" that holds the floor in place as it fires a nail into "just the right spot". The rule. I highly recommend them.

At this point, we had a room that was ready to go. Our checklist:

Clean room

Moldings removed

Lots of bamboo flooring

Hammers, nails, etc.

Tapping block (for beating the floor into place without damaging it)

Big rubber mallet (for tapping block and air hammer)

Flooring spacers

Pneumatic floor nailer (and nails)

Air compressor

Table saw (with 60+ tooth finishing blade, important!)

As with any project, the exceptions took most of the time. The regular sections of the floor were very quick. We spent most of our time making the custom fits in the closet and around the doors. The nailer was great. Words of warning: you can only use a nailer on the center of the room, you must do the first two and last two rows by hand (the nailer won't fit).

Here's the room at about 60%. We moved the saw back onto the completed section to make room. We kept the vacuum handy to keep the dust down. In retrospect, I was much happier wearing the dust mask than not.

We ended up needing to work on it Sunday as well. It's not that it took all that long, but we weren't really prepared, so we didn't work quickly on the first day. We ended up needing to buy more materials because we didn't include the closet in the original specification. Oops.

The floor ended up looking really nice. This wasn't the end of the project though. We ended up painting next. After that, we installed nice fresh moldings throughout the whole place.

Our frog was not pleased when we transported the molding home from Depot. He was rather smushed. That's a technical term.

This weekend, I decided to replace the old fireplace screen with a new one. After a bit of shopping, I settled on the Grandion Bay model.. All told, replacing a fireplace screen with a set of doors is not especially difficult. However, it is especially dirty. It was worth the work. Here's the finished product, during it's test flight:

So, it seems that my project this week is reworking a bathroom with my neighbor Adam. He's got a really full schedule, as he works full time, looks after four kids (at the moment), and volunteers at least 30 hours a week on the ambulance.

The houses in our neighborhood are about 50 years old. I think his bathroom is original; but I'm not sure. I do know that it's old. I also know that it's gotta go.

We spend about 2 hours at Depot picking out the materials that we would need.. We got a late start on Sunday; and we finally started the demolition around 4 in the afternoon.

We managed to demolish the bathroom in about 45 minutes. Here's two pictures of the old bathroom sitting on the curb.

I think you will agree that its useful life was over. Don't mind the shed door in the pictures; I built a new one on Saturday; so it went to the curb at the same time.

So far, we've managed to demolish, lay a new floor, partially cover the walls with the new tile/panel, install the toilet, and install the sink. Hopefully we will finish the tile/panel tonight or tomorrow; then on to the spackle and paint.